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HDD to SSD cloning

This weekend I migrated from an HDD to a SSD drive in my laptop. Because my laptop is a Samsung Chronos machine, I opted for the 1T 840 EVO drive. When you buy the drive, you get a small flier with some rather useless information on how to perform the migration. You also get a CD containing the migration software.

SSD Performance Benchmark

I might add at this point that the reason for the migration was purely because of some rather poor performance from my laptop. The HDD spent most of the day at 100% Active, and would spike drastically when switching between applications

My first few attempts at cloning the HDD onto the SSD failed. The process would get to about 67% and fail. The migration software displayed an obscure error about the process not being able to complete .

The end result of all these failed attempts being that my HDD had picked up a few bad sectors. The bad sectors were the reason for my machines poor performance, as well as the cloning process failing.

To get around this I did the following:

Ditched the Samsung software and downloaded a free copy of Macrium Reflect

Backed up and removed all files from the HDD that I did not need. This brought the disk usage down to around the 100GB size.

Cleared out all old files – temp, recycle bin, etc

Ran the defragger to optimise the drive

Ran scandisk

Did the clone using the Macrium Reflect software

I did try EaseUS but it did not detect the SSD. The SSD arrives in an unformatted state, so you would have to partition and format it first.

Below are some links to the software I tried. For me the Macrium software did the trick.